protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search
your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.
'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all
over the place. They don't exist any longer.'
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused
ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months
past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party
shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was
darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades.
You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less
furtively on the 'free' market.
'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and
faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the
end of the counter.
'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said Syme.
'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the
flicks, I suppose.'
'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes
seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to
see those prisoners hanged.' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously
orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of
helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-
criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking
to him was largely a ma